Catching Mom
by The . L O S T . Paperclip
Summary: Something strange is going on at Wammy's, and 10yr old Nate Rivers seems to be the target. Now he and the other orphans are trapped between an inescapable maze and the ghost of something terrible... Will they make it out alive? *Not for the faint-hearted*
1. A Cry In The Night

_This is a pointless horror fic, and has nothing to do with the storyline of Death Note. Everyone is aged from ten to twelve. Rated for blood, gore, and whatever other horrors I can think of. Just a note: I'm Australian. The only reason this fic has American spelling is because that's how I saw it in the dream. Yes, this is all the result of a dream I had - the title, the flashbacks, some of the scenes even. I have a very disturbing subconscious, no?_

_Disclaimer:__ I don't own Death Note. I give you permission to gasp in shock now._

**Catching Mom**

_**Chapter 1: A Cry In The Night**_

_He nestled into the soft warmth of his mother, finally calm enough to sleep for the first time since he could remember. But something was... a little off. Something was wrong with the picture he could see in mis mind. But, unlike most six-year-olds would, he simply dismissed it as his imagination._

_Because nothing could ruin this for him._

_He was finally with his mother again._

_He heard her breathe slowly, rhythmically, like a long lost lullaby sung from an obscure place._

"Ring around the rosy..." _A woman's soft voice chimed in his ears._ "A pocket full of posy..." _He snuggled closer and nuzzled into his mother's chest, not wanting to forget the sound, when a strange scent filled his nose. _"Ashes, ashes..." _It was salty and... metallic. A similar taste entered his mouth._ "We all fall down."

_His breath caught as he recognised it, along with the strangeness of the situation._

_His mother was dead._

"We all fall down."

_Then what...?_

_The boy's eyes shot open, and instantly filled with tears of terror as he realised exactly where he was. Coughing and spitting the blood away from his face, tears running down his cheeks already, he tried to sit up. But he couldn't. A pair of stiff arms was holding him close; cradling him like a mother would her child._

_Cradling him into her open chest cavity, which was slowly filling with blood like a bowl of water. Her exposed lungs were expanding periodically around his face and heart was thumping just above his snowy white hair, now stained with her blood. Some of her spine could be seen; just a flash of bone white amongst the dark crimson of blood and inflamed flesh._

_A small-bodied spider with legs that had the span of a plate began crawling towards him from the edge of his vision, stepping lightly on the dead flesh of his live mother._

_He couldn't breathe. Blood filled his mouth and lungs, and eventually consumed his sight as well. No matter how hard he struggled, the boy couldn't remove the pair of strong, cold arms that were embracing him._

_Killing him._

We all... fall... down...

_Nate Rivers screamed; the endless, piercing shriek of a dying child._

The noise carried into reality as Near woke, and he had to force himself to stop by clapping a hand over his mouth. He was panting heavily and sweat beaded on his forehead. Images of the nightmare swirled violently behind his eyes. He shook his head and squeezed them shut in an attempt to rid himself of the horrors of what he had just witnessed in his mind. It all seemed so real...

The dark seemed to be closing in on him, and Near hugged a knee to his chest, simultaniously reaching for a toy for comfort.

But his hand froze inches from the roughly crafted robotic figure as something beside it caugt his eye.

A set of finger puppets were standing on his bedside table, watching over him protectively as he slept. That was okay; he had put them there. It made him feel better whenever he woke up from a nightmare, though they usually weren't this bad... But there was something else on that table that deeply disturbed him, despite how innocent it sounded.

Another puppet had joined those Near had placed there. It was a tall figure, with white hair falling to its waist and dull grey eyes lighting its face. There was sorrow in its... in _her_ expression, and the others had the same lamentful face as well.

Near knew who it was, though he refused to believe it. He withdrew his hand quickly as if the puppet would bite, and the small albino rubbed his eyes frantically.

_This is just my eyes playing tricks on me,_ he assured himself. _A copletely logical explanation. It could happen to anyone._

And the puppet was gone when he looked again.

Cold shivers ran down his spine, and Near could _feel_ someone else in the room. But, rather than investigating, he just shrank back into bed. Though he knew very well that blankets were not any sort of protection against... well, anything, really... he still wrapped them around him as much as humanly possible. It made him feel better, despite the absence of logic.

One thing the boy didn't notice, though, was that the other puppet's expressions had stayed the same.

The one modelled off himself had a single red tear running down its miniature woolen face.

Before he could get anywhere even remotely close to sleep, however, Near heard voices coming from outside his room.


	2. Missing

_It's about time I continued this thing. Thanks to __**Maybesunny**__, __**Blom Momomiya**__, __**WerewolfNobody**__ and __**DisturbedXoXo**__ for the reviews so far!_

_This will change points of view throughout the story (mainly between Near, Matt and Mello, and maybe some smaller characters or OCs), but it's pretty easy to follow who it is because it's in third person. Short chapter, I know, but deal with it because if it were any longer it would be boring. The next one is quite creepy. I managed to make a nine-year-old have nightmares (she's all right, people - she asked me to tell the story again when she woke up)._

**Catching Mom**

_**Chapter 2: Missing**_

Mello woke with a start, a sheen of sweat coating his face and plastering his deep blonde hair to his forehead. He was breathing heavily as he sat up - the boy hadn't actually had a nightmare, but he felt drained. Like he hadn't slept at all.

Something was wrong. He could feel it... And smell it. Like burnt plastic. Mello wrinkled his nose.

His gaze wandered to the small television in the room, screen fuzzy with static. The Playstation next to it was burnt out and melted, a slow stream of thin, black smoke rising from the back of the destroyed device. The scene was eerily odd to Mello, and his suspicion grew when he saw that Matt's bed was empty. Though that was usually the case, the redhead was usually passed out on the beanbag in front of the television, controller in hand. That this was not the case was unnerving.

"Matt," he called. "Matt, you dumbass, where are you?"

No answer. The boy stepped out of bed slowly, bare feet cold on the carpet, and padded around the room in search of his friend. When there was no sign of him, Mello sighed. _Idiot must have gone to get a midnight snack,_ he thought. And, knowing Matt, he would have neglected once again to retrieve some chocolate for Mello.

So the blonde pressed against the door of their room and entered the hallway. But the door gave way too easily, creaking open without so much as a touch. Mello inspected the area around the handle closer to see that it was splintered slightly - a sign of struggle. Or Matt could have been in a _real_ rush to go to the kitchen. _Or the bathroom,_ Mello added with mild humor. It wasn't unlike Matt to get so overly dramatic that he breaks things.

As he passed a door, he heard a couple of girls squeal. There was a shuffling sound and a gasp, then silence. Shaking his head, he continued on his way to his stash of chocolate. Girls never really interested him...

Something caught his eye at the end of the hallway. A dark stain on the wall, next to the doorway that led to the kitchen.

The stain grew. And gained colour. A deep, sickly crimson bled down the wall in a defined pattern. Like a foreign symbol, but definitely not of a language he knew.

It creeped down the wall, dripping off the pattern, and formed a sentence. Hardly clear at first, but it sharpened enough to be able to recognise each individual word. And those words made Mello's stomach drop to his knees.

_Mail Jeevas, Mail Jeevas, I'm coming for you._

Mello ran. He wanted the message to be a lie. He _needed_ it to be merely an image his disturbed, tired mind had conjured up. But when he got to the wall, he saw with horror that the blood came off easily and stained his hands. He wiped the message away furiously, and much to his relief it smudged so that the letters were indiscernible. But the message was still there. Still in his mind and on his hands. He slumped against the bloody wall, staining his clothes and skin.

Mello hardly noticed that his eyes were brimming with tears.

He wanted to go back to sleep. To wake up and find out it was all a dream. _It could still be a dream,_ he thought hopefully. _A nightmare._ But the next thing he saw made bile rise in his throat and the tears overflow. Dream or no, he wondered how fate could be so cruel.

A flash of red hair, and black and white stripes, hanging. Upside down - from the feet - and tied to the fan in the kitchen. Blood was everywhere. All over the figure's face. It had spilled over and onto the stone bench, cascaded to the floor and pooled underneath. There was so much...

A small sound rose in Mello's throat, but he couldn't get it out. After a small struggle with himself, Mello screamed.

And then it was gone. Just a flash, and Matt was no longer the one hanging.

It was Roger. He was strung up by the feet and his throat... almost split in two. Sliced all the way from left to right and hanging open. His face had a look of pure horror permanently fixed to it, and the blood was in his mouth, his eyes, his hair. It was obvious that Roger had been alive when he was hung, and died of blood loss... extremely slowly.

The first thing that came to mind was the way they butcher pigs.

Mello's face echoed that of the man's, and the only way he kept from vomiting was because he was still screaming.

Because this was too real.


	3. Diced

_Once again, I shall thank my reviewers __**Death-N'-Hell**__, __**Bloom Momomiya **__and __**LostHazelEyes**__ :) Don't get angry at me, but I'll be torturing Matt quite a bit in this story. (Oh, and I drew Near's mother and it looks awesome. She's pretty damn creepy. But I am afraid I have no way to transfer the picture to the computer D:)_

**Catching Mom**

_**Chapter 3: Diced**_

The redhead threw the controller down in frustration. He couldn't for the life of him shoot _every_ one of the stinking fish in under thirty seconds. It really drove him mad.

Matt slumped back into the beanbag and sighed as the 'Game Over' screen reared its ugly head.

There was a small flash and a spark, and the next thing saw was his beloved Playstation burst into flames. Matt yelped and jumped up, intent on dousing the flame with... something, his foot maybe, but it was over all too quickly. What was left was hardly a lump of bubbling plastic. "Aw, crap," he whimpered. Roger would kill him. He had borrowed it off the man's grandson to play for a week - Matt hardly had any sleep during that time - and was supposed to take it back in a couple of days.

He would have to get Mello to help bury the evidence. Or swallow it. Whichever worked.

"Mello," he drawled. "Meeelloooo!"

The boy didn't wake. Matt sighed and walked up to him. "Mello!" He shook said boy lightly.

Nothing. The blonde slept like a log.

Matt was an inch from his ear. "MEEELLOOOOOOO!!"

He stood back and placed his fists on his hips. This was strange. Matt could shriek extremely loud if called for, and this was a situation he deemed worthy. But it hadn't worked. It was like Mello was in a coma.

Matt shook his head. _Must've gotten into the sleeping pills or something,_ he thought, half-heartedly trying to convince himself. His gaze wandered back to the fuzzy television screen absently. Then to the eerie shadow behind it. His eyes widened slightly in fear as he watched the darkness take shape. It cleared quite quickly...

A face.

Hair shone silver in the flickering light of the static and her eyes were completely black. No whites or irises. Flawless, wintry skin and perfect features. It was alienly beautiful in a very twisted way, but held a disturbing undercurrent that Matt couldn't help but ingnore. He was fascinated more than terrified. Then she opened her mouth.

At first it was just as graceful and otherworldly as the rest of her, thin lips parted to reveal small, tapered teeth seeming to glitter with a silvery saliva. But then she opened it wider. Her face instantly took a disturbing turn for the worst - a deep shadow in every feature and her eyes seeming to bleed from the corners. But the more obvious - and more terrifying - change was that her 'mouth' didn't stop at the corners. It split up her pale cheeks and around her ears, parting har skin in a way that made sludge come to mind. Her teeth grew longer as her mouth grew wider, and her jaw no longer seemed to be attached to the rest of her as she opened it wider and wider.

The everything happened in a second. _It_ gave a chilling shriek and flew towards him in a blur of speed. Matt fell to his backside as a burst of air overbalanced him. He scrambled to his feet, unable to think due to the white-hot fear coursing through him, and ran at the door. He had to get away. He had to get out.

The door wouldn't open.

The thing was in his face suddenly, and Matt flew backwards in shock and terror, screaming. Then it was gone again, and he slammed into the door before it could return. The handle splintered just enough to be able to exit the room.

He glanced around frantically, now in the dark hallway. The door slammed shut behind him. _What the hell was that!?_ He was finally able to gather his thoughts.

Matt knew he hadn't been dreaming. He had a strange ability to _always _know when he was dreaming, and to change the course of things with his thoughts. It _could _have been a figment of his overactive imagination, but that was unlikely. Figments don't freaking _shriek_ at you. It wasn't a hologram or anything sci-fi like that. An alien, perhaps? Or maybe a glitch in the Matrix. Whatever it was, it might not have necessarily been malevolent... Maybe a trickster or something? The ghost of a girl that just likes scaring people? Well, at least Mello was okay. The thing wouldn't be able to wake him up if it tried.

He began to calm down as possibilities ran through his mind, each one less plausible than the last. That was how the gamer's mind worked - always hoping for something abnormal to happen in order to take him away from this reality. And he would believe any of it if it was shown to him. Matt gathered his courage and went back to his room.

But the door was stuck. It wouldn't open. Again. "This isn't funny," he muttered to the thing. Wherever it was.

But the calm evaporated when he glanced at the door opposite him.

It was obvious from the second it started that blood was seeping from the door. It appeared in tiny droplets, like it does when one grazes the top layer of skin on their knee, in a defined pattern. A symbol that looked somewhat like a curved 'X' with a line across the top and down the side. The substance dripped down the door and began pooling underneath it.

Matt approached cautiously, dabbing the stuff with his fingers. It was real. He opened the door and entered the room, looking at the other side. There was absolutely no logical way the blood could be there; but it was. Matt glanced at the front of the door again, and it was gone. not a trace of it left.

He wasn't the least bit unnerved by this. Not by any of it. The fact that it was real came easily to him; the rest will come when it happens. This thing was obviously the cause of the the symbol to appear, and Matt was never one to overthink things - how he was coming third in all of Wammys was a mystery to him.

But he wouldn't be able to keep his cool for long. Or so he would soon see. Because the symbol was now hovering in midair, above one of the two beds in the room. The occupant he knew as a clingy girl named Linda. They were friends, sort of. She sat with him at lunch sometimes.

This time he was admittedly scared. Blood on a wall was one thing; but this defied all laws of physics. He raced over to the girl, keeping clear of the floating symbol.

But he blinked, and it was gone. Matt froze. This was getting _weird_. He walked up to Linda, _slowly_, to see if she was okay.

"Linda," he whispered. "Linda, wake up. C'mon!" He grasped her arm as fear rose in his throat.

He tugged once, trying to wake her up. Trying to make her respond. He tugged twice. But her eyes were closed, and her chest wasn't moving. He tugged a third time, panic setting in.

The girl's arm came free, completely removed from her body. Matt screamed and dropped the limb.

Blood spread across her sheets slowly, staining the clean white darkly. It was in a pattern... lines crossed around neat squares. Matt knew he shouldn't. He knew he would regret this.

But he pulled off the covers.

Linda was stark naked and covered in bloody seams that coloured her deathly pale skin. Checkered lines patterned her entire body, and stained the sheets she was lying on. Matt gasped in horror as her head rolled to the side and off her pillow. It landed on the floor at his feet with a _thud_, then split into small cubes. As did the rest of her body.

Matt stumbled backwards, only to trip over her roommate's bed. He wished he didn't look, but he did.

Linda's roommate, Snowe, was nothing but a charred corpse. Somehow, she had burned to death while he was in the room without making a sound.

Matt ran. Finally, he let fear consume him and _finally_ he was all for preserving his own life. He was gasping and whimpering as he stumbled out of the room and into the chilled hallway.

Then he froze.

The symbol bled out of a door to his left. And one almost directly across from him. Almost every door in the hall was now covered in the bleeding symbol. Only his own, and a few others, were free of the thing. There was the same bone-chilling shriek he had heard earlier, and he ran for it.

But he was compelled to look again. To peek into the rooms - just to see if his panicked theory was true.

He kicked open the door next to him, and his suspicion, and terror, grew as high as it got. Matt retched as his eyes lit upon the boy who was lying in the centre of the room. Well, most of him, anyway. His torso had been ripped open from neck to groin and his organs were scattered all over the room, his blood smeared onto the walls with a rough hand.

His roommate had been dismembered and stuffed into the boy's open chest cavity.

Matt knew it was true. He didn't need any more proof. Wherever the symbol was, death followed.

He was indescribably relieved that there was none near Mello.

But... the rooms without symbols? There had to be _someone_ still alive in this place.

So he entered one of the few rooms that were free of the bloody mark.

And the two girls were sleeping soundly. Red and Nikki, he remembered. He sighed in relief as one of them sat up and glared at him. Matt slammed the door behind him and slumped against the wood, noticing only then that he was hyperventilating. Red, who had pale, icy blue hair and a spiky attitude, was glaring distrustfully at him. Nikki, however, squealed in delight.

"Hey Matt," she drawled, giggling. Red turned her glare to her friend, then shook her head and pointed at his hands. They were still covered in blood from his incident with Linda. Nikki gasped and a heavy silence hung in the air.

Matt tried to stand up slowly, still leaning against the door for support, but found that he had no more strength in his legs. "They're d-dead," he panted. "Everyone."

Red got out of bed, still silent, and padded over to him. She held out a hand and helped him to his feet, then wiped the blood on her shirt.

Nikki was about to say something cutting, but was cut off by a boyish shriek. Coming from the kitchen.

Matt would recognise that scream anywhere.

"Mello," he breathed. Then he turned and ran back out into his nightmare.


End file.
